Things I think about in the middle of the night after Desmond wakes me up

Maybe, after I finally finish my dissertation, I should go back to school to get an MA in something useful so that I can get a real job.
Sarah Palin is the perfect woman -- she is both an inspiration for conservatives around the country and offers the rest of us a woman to hate without guilt. And that we couldn't really hate Hillary without guilt since she has all that talent, experience, and intelligence. Not a perfect woman.
In the dream I had before Desmond woke me up, I was thinking the name "Ellas" was a great girl's name -- but my waking mind changed it to "Ellis." Ellis Lushbaugh, though, is kind of a disaster. My dream also came up with "Maxine." Which was weird.
The rest of the night I spent trying to position my head in a way to keep my nose from running.

Yoga in the Evening, Yoga in the Morning

I joined Groupon to see what it was all about around the same time I was wanting to start doing yoga somewhere but decided it was too expensive. Then Groupon offered a $30 for 10 classes deal at a Bikram yoga joint in Elk Grove -- about a twenty minute drive from me. Twenty minutes became 45 minutes during rush hour and I came in late and already sweaty.

Dude, Bikram yoga is crazy. It's stinky, super duper sweaty, and not at all relaxing. Actually, when I finally left, I really did feel clean. Stinky, sticky but oddly clean.

The yoga instructor stands up front, near a yoga mat which I'm guessing she brings as a prop that's supposed to remind us that she is in fact a yoga instructor and not the tankini-clad drill instructor we could mistake her for -- she didn't step on her mat once since she was too busy spitting instructions at us, while sweating, to manage a pose. Bikram yoga is all about holding poses in 100 degree temperature. No downward dog or warrior one or child's pose. Either you're lying on your back in "corpse pose" or you're twisted around yourself like a mangled, and sweating, corpse trying to concentrate on not falling or passing out but finding it difficult because the instructor won't stop spitting out instructions -- "hold the pose don't look down look in the mirror look at your eyes never close your eyes breathe it's okay if you feel dizzy this is normal hold the pose hold the pose" she claps loudly "now bend your knees lie down with your palms up in corpse pose keep your eyes open never close your eyes breathe" -- as if what we're doing is not actually standing awkwardly still but giddily square dancing, in a smelly, sweaty barn. It was the longest 90 minutes of my life. It was seriously ten minutes until the end of class for about a half an hour.

The next morning I decided to finally check out the free yoga class that's offered at McKinley Park, two blocks away from our house. I've seen them all summer, but never really cared one way or the other to join them. But I went and, relief, this is the kind of yoga I remember. A calm voice telling me to unite with my heart, to feel myself rooted to the earth, to sense my breath flowing through my movement as we go from downward dog to warrior one and two and triangle. Then the yoga earth mother stopped our flow to ask if we wanted to learn to stand on our heads, asked for a volunteer, praised our volunteer, and then reprimanded a head-standing non-volunteer for not showing our volunteer ample respect and attention and reminded us all to direct our love toward those who put themselves out there. Weird. But then we got back to yoga and doing way too many planks for my liking.

In the end, it's been a good yoga weekend for me. My arms are sore from planking and my body may be (or may not be, who knows) detoxified thanks to sweat lodge pose-holding. And, because of the crazy Groupon deal, I have to see this Bikram thing through until the end. Nine more classes.

Desmond must be socialized.

Not really. I just thought that he might enjoy hanging out with littler people and that spending all day with me -- at home, at the playground, at the grocery store, at Ikea -- has got to be dull dull dull. So he had his first half-day of daycare on Tuesday. It went well with only a few minor tears. Today, day two, was a little more dramatic. We walk over to daycare (it's down the block from our house) and I sit and chat with Miss Teacher while Desmond is glued to the screen door. I say "bye" to Desmond. And Desmond says "bye" to all the kids in daycare, cause that's what polite kids do when they leave. Poor kid.

I texted Miss Teacher and learned he was bribed into tearlessness by a cookie.


And then I got a text around 10 AM that Desmond fell asleep. Turns out, he decided he wanted to play trucks by himself so he shut the play room door in Miss Teacher's face, who thought she'd let him decompress for a little bit. When she checked up on him two minutes later, he was playing trucks. Two minutes after that he was asleep on the trucks. He's kind of like an opossum, you see. He uses sleep to throw predators off his scent.

Miss Teacher warned me that things would get worse before they got better, especially since he's only going twice a week. She recommended I be firm with him when dropping him off -- no anxiety or sad faces. And also, to stop by with him on odd days just to hang out and play for a little.

Yes, I can do these things. I have to get over a little of my guilt. I mean, there's no practical reason why he has to go to daycare. It gives me a little time to work on my dissertation, but I did without it last year and managed to finish a chapter. The idea is, though, that he'll be out in the world -- listening to other adults and other kids without mommy hovering behind him. And I'm a bit of a hovercraft. When we came home today -- aside from not getting a full nap -- he wouldn't let me out of his sight. I went to grab some of his books from the other room and he was afraid I was gone for good. A world without mom has to be a survivable place for him, right?

Study shop

The study, in middle-class Victorian homes, was meant to serve as a masculine retreat from the femininity of the domestic domain. Lined with books and piled with documents, the study was dampened from the din of a bustling home and marked a calm center amid a perceived chaos. Virginia Woolf remembers her father's study as a sacred place at the top of their home on Hyde Park Gate that served as the seat of paternal intellect: "Downstairs there was pure convention: upstairs pure intellect." The study defined itself on the absence of physical labor. It was a space of scholarly pursuits, where the mind rather than the body worked. In contrast to the space outside -- at the height of the Industrial Revolution -- where the laboring body kept the Empire running, the study offered a fantasy image of man as pure mind.

Now that we're all through with manufacturing and physical labor in the work place, tied to a desk pushing papers -- or that's what they tell me at least -- it is the shop rather than the study that fulfills a masculine fantasy. To work with one's hands and create an object from scratch seems to shut out domestic noise as efficiently as books and paper and offers a different kind of retreat from a different kind of laboring world. In an economy in which what is exchanged is no longer money for labor but money for debt -- or debt for debt, something like that -- the specter-ized body finds a home in the home, or in the factory inside the home.

All of which is said not to dissuade *anybody* from entering his/her shop. But just to put some noted malaise into a context -- my context of choice.

Tennis, Playgroups, French.

It's US Open season, and I'm tennis'ed out. The internet is providing me with free coverage, all day long. Bonkers.
In between matches, I grade papers, play trains, knit, feel allergic to stuff, think.
I've been going to a new playgroup with Desmond. A woman who used to live across the street from me moved a couple of blocks away and has a son about Desmond's age. She kept inviting us over, but I was hesitant. Her son signs -- "all the kids sign." And, since Desmond is more of a pointer than a signer, I wasn't sure if he'd be accepted. Of course I mean if I'd be accepted -- but since I'm not the one playing or signing who the fuck cares, frankly? So we went, and Desmond loves it. Calder (the boy's house) has tons of things with wheels. And since they're not his own toys, Desmond spends hours wheeling around the backyard, not minding me a bit.
And I met a fellow dissertation mommy. From Missouri, no less! She is/was working on her PhD from the Sorbonne in French Lit, with Cixous's daughter as her diss advisor. And she's writing on space. Me too! But she's writing her's in French. No thanks. I'll just have a baguette, please, sans diss-written-in-French.
Desmond here is playing with wooden clogs at a friend's family's cabin in the Ozarks. Like most summer days in Missouri, it was very humid that day -- in fact, we just got caught in a thunderstorm.

Some Summer Thoughts in Sacramento

I want to open a bookstore. I have no idea how to run a business or start a business. But I do love, on my walks with Desmond, letting my mind wander thinking about what the store will look like, the kinds of books we'd sell, how I'd offer ESL classes in the back, and host monthly lectures for a "Free University" series. It'd be called "Watershed Books" and we'd sell books on "art, culture and politics" A hipster kind of bookstore, with fancy art books, and pompous cultural studies books, and some poetry and fiction. But, more than a store that sells books -- cause who needs to buy books at a store? -- it'd be a kind of community space to meet like-minded people and see what they're reading. Dave said some sort of web format is imperative, which is a frightening but practical idea.

I'm also not thinking about the last chapter of my dissertation. Worrisome.

But I do think about all the babies my friends are having or are about to have. About how sadly far away they are. Once friends have babies it should be mandatory -- a federal law -- that they all move within a 50 mile radius of one another. Why isn't that a law yet?

Six Months Later . . .

The washer is running.
NPR is informing.
Curious George is oo-oo-ah-ahing.
I am typing.
Mad Men is downloading.
The electricity is working.

Year One

We had a birthday party for Desmond, because he turned one!
If I were to guess how old he was based on how many years I've aged since he was born or how many pounds I've lost I'd guess he's anywhere between ten years to two weeks old. But, in fact, he's one year old. So my parents and brother flew out from St. Louis and we threw a party at my sister-in-law's.
I think I may never host a one-year-old birthday party again, to preface. If Desmond were to ever have a sibling, s/he's already doomed. Or saved -- because it didn't seem like Desmond was having the best time of his life (that would be the day Dave flailed around the living room pretending to be a gorilla).
But I'd been planning this for months: a simple-to-make but hearty lunch menu of bbq brisket and baked beans (actually, the brisket wasn't that easy and was SUPER expensive. but also very delicious); a guest list that was generous but realistic; a cute photo-postcard invitation, specifying NO PRESENTS (Dave has a fear of plastic overload), but secretly knowing they would come; and, most importantly, the completion of a dissertation chapter to allow for a greater ease of socializing.
And it all turned out fine -- not everyone showed, which was a relief, but enough to make it seem like a party. Desmond, apparently, isn't fond of the limelight. But he was offered several supervised "be-alone" trips outside to calm his fragile nerves. And my mother likes to put things under my nose to look at when I already have quite enough under there to keep my attention. And my dad likes to do things slowly when things, for some reason I've concocted, must be done faster. Honestly, I was a perspiring, nervously-smiling, frosting-smeared mess by the end of the three hours.
But . . . I'm glad I did it . . . ? No, I am. It was fun and I got to see folks I haven't in a while, and come out as the mess I really am.